The Soft Police State

The real surveillance state isn’t the Flock camera on the pole - it’s the smiling asshole with 3.5 million followers walking up to strangers in a park, running his own Coldplay Kiss-Cam on his iPhone. In the process, he’s turning a park bench kiss into career death for the sake of clicks.

Millions of people are watching Jay Guapõ approach two lawyers on a Central Park bench, barking “Get a room” and “There’s kids around” - and then he keeps filming as they ask him to stop. He then cheeredleadered the spectacle into millions of views. 3.5 - 5 million views depending on the stat you read.

Nathaniel Cullerton (partner, reportedly married) and Kelsey Borenzweig (legal associate) at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz got doxxed, investigated, and then put on leave from their jobs - nuking a lucrative job promotion for Cullerton in the process. The internet did what the internet does: speculated about the affair, moralized about the age gap and workforce power dynamic, and treated the ambush as wildly fun entertainment - à la the Coldplay Kiss-Cam.

This one hits a bit different. The Coldplay couple bought a ticket and attended an event - an event that advertised the idea that its attendees (famously) become part of the show. Sure, Guapõ’s targets were in a public space, where the expectation of privacy does not exist, but they didn’t sit down on the bench and start kissing under the pretense they bought a ticket to some sort of event running the same act of audience participation. Don’t people in NYC just mind their own business? - [insert sarcasm here]

Meanwhile, across the country, people are losing their collective minds and actively tearing down, bagging, painting, sawing, and shooting Flock Safety cameras off poles. Cities are canceling contracts as activists map the camera locations, protest them, and treat the license-plate readers as the visible face of society’s prison panopticon.

So, if I am understanding this correctly, privacy is sacred when the camera is bolted to a streetlight and feeds a database. Privacy is off the table - actually it’s entertainment - when the camera is in a content creator’s hand and the targets are two people minding their own business on a public park bench.

Which is it?

You can’t have it both ways. Either we still believe adults can exist in public without every private moment becoming international HR material - with the public as the arbiters- or we accept that the phone in every pocket is a more effective and arbitrary surveillance tool than any government contract. The Flock rage is coherent only if you care about mass data collection, mission creep, and unaccountable tracking. The TikTok applause is coherent only if you think the highest use of a camera is personal destruction for social media engagement. Pretty sick when you think about it.

This is digital triangulation at work. The platforms, and the culture they reward, don’t want you living an actual life. They want you performing your life under constant threat of capture. A lunchtime make-out becomes a scandal because some comedian decided your face was his inventory. The same people who will lecture you about “surveillance capitalism” and “the right to be left alone” will then share, stitch, and moralize the video of the couple who asked the stranger to put the phone down and leave them alone.

The hypocrisy is not subtle. The hypocrisy is the product.

Public space used to mean something. You could be a man and a woman on a bench in summer without every passerby treating you as potential clickbait. You could fail, screw up, kiss the wrong person, or simply exist without the permanent record of some random asshole with a following. Now that world is dying because we keep feeding the people who kill it. Guapõ didn’t invent this, he simply (and quite efficiently) performed his act in the current business model: find the moment, film the discomfort, post it, and let the social media mob do the rest. When the couple pushed back - as anyone would (or should… lawyer dude should’ve pressed back way harder imo - like kicked the guy’s ass). That only made the circus seals bark and clap louder.

The deeper sickness is the selective application of principle. When the camera is corporate or governmental, we suddenly discover our inner civil libertarian and start cutting down poles. When the camera belongs to a TikToker harvesting embarrassment, we call it “accountability” and forget anything resembling a surveillance state - piling on like some jury selected for morality control. One is framed as resistance. The other is framed as justice. Both are the same impulse: control what other people want to do of their own accord, and control their time in shared space - literally, in the public square.

Analog manliness does not require you to like the lawyers, defend the alleged affair, or pretend power dynamics don’t exist in a workplace. It requires you to recognize a society that cannot tolerate two adults kissing on a park bench without turning it into bloodsport has already surrendered the public square. You don’t get to cheer the ambush and then cry about Flock. You pick - one or the other, bubba, what’s it gonna be? Either the cameras in our hands are the bigger threat to living like a free people, or the ones on the poles are. Pretending both can be true depending on the day’s narrative is the coward’s position. Actually, it’s pure bullshit.

Live accordingly. Put the phone down yourself, to stop rewarding the ones who won’t. The alternative is a world where every park bench is a potential TV set, and every private failure becomes someone else’s payday. That’s not progress - it’s a soft police state with better lighting and terrible incentives.

Now where’s my espresso,

Todd